]]>Around the time of World War II, fuel rations caused Europeans to look to alternative means to power their cars. Some attached hulking tanks to the back of their car that burned wood chips as fuel.

Several years ago, George Mason University graduate student Jason Force had a modern idea for the technology: Because grass pellets are just as good as wood chips for this kind of system, why not create a lawn mower with it? It could power itself with the grass it harvested. It could also be self-guiding, like a Roomba, so users would not longer have to mow their own lawn.

He got to work on the self-guiding aspect five years ago. The idea grew into a startup called EcoMow Technologies. Its team began working on the chemical engineering last year.

Force tested the robot among consumers and found that they loved the idea. But investors hated it. Developing software for this type of robot is highly complicated and will be a big challenge for the EcoMow team.

“Because it’s such a major departure from what the public has seen before, they consider it too risky,” Force said in an interview. “A lot of work would have to go into this product to make it safe; don’t run over your pets or children, don’t run into the street and cause an accident. The concern was we would get to the end of the $2 million development cycle and the customers would just decide they didn’t like it.”

For now, EcoMow is pursuing another product: a larger mower that will harvest hay fields for fuel pellets, which can then be sold. It won’t have as sophisticated of a guidance system, but it uses the same chemistry as the consumer model and, more importantly, has found support among investors. EcoMow plans to produce a prototype by April and sell it to customers next year.

Force said he hasn’t forgotten about the consumer mower. He still plans to develop it, likely beginning in 2016. A small model designed to manicure lawns less than an acre in size might cost $500 and weigh less than 10 pounds. A larger model for a 10-acre property might cost $2,000 to $3,000.

An EcoMow prototype. Photo courtesy of Melissa Cannarozzi.

Force also sees the EcoMow as a potentially powerful tool in developing nations. Instead of building a power plant and biomass processor, plus buying a harvester to collect biomass, communities could use a version of the EcoMow for all three.

“An application I’m pursuing is having little micro grids set up in East Africa where the units would go harvest during the night and then come back and plug themselves in to a power unit during the day and supply power to the local region during the day,” he said. “It would be operating all the time, but dividing its time between power generation and harvesting. In this capacity it would lower the barrier for developing nations to have a new energy economy in areas that don’t currently have one.”

]]>Cool Planet Energy Systems has lined up some big-name investors (Google Ventures, BP, ConocoPhillips, NRG) and made some bold claims about its ability to produce cheap biofuels that can be a direct gasoline replacement. Now the company needs to raise money to build its first commercial processing plant to prove it can deliver on that promise.

The California company, founded in 2009, announced Wednesday that it’s projecting a biofuel production cost of $1.50 per gallon at a plant that can produce 10 million gallons per year. Cool Planet is looking to raise around $100 million for that first 10 million-gallon facility and for production and other corporate expenses. That first plant would have a capital cost of $50 million, said Howard Janzen, CEO of Cool Planet. At those estimates the biofuel could be produced for less than the price of crude oil.

The company hopes to complete the project and start delivering fuel in the first half of 2014. Janzen said some of the company’s investors will be the ones in line to get the first shipments from that plant, though he declined to disclose their names. The plant is planned for the U.S., but the location hasn’t been settled, said Janzen.

A plant of 10 million gallons seems small, given many biofuel makers want to build commercial plants at twice the size. But Cool Planet figures the way to reduce costs, such as transporting energy crops, is to build many smaller plants that are close to the feedstock source. They should be within a 30-mile radius, says Janzen.

All this sounds like a good plan, and almost too good to be true. Janzen said the company’s investors were very skeptical before they put up the money, too. Janzen declined to say how much Cool Planet has raised.

Google is completing a field trial at its Mountain View headquarters using gasoline with a 5 percent blend of Cool Planet’s biofuel. Google has used the blended fuel to log 2,490 miles in one car, which is just slightly less than 2,514 miles in a car that uses 100 percent conventional gasoline. The car with the biofuel passed 5 smog tests and its emissions were “virtually identical” to the gasoline-only car, Cool Planet said.

Cool Planet has come up with a technology that is quite different than the fermentation and other chemical processes that are under development. The company uses high heat and pressure to compress woodchips, crop wastes or other feedstock in an oxygen-free environment. The desired temperature is around 350 degrees Celsius and the pressure at 150 psi. This process creates vapor that is then converted to fuel. The process also generates biochar, which then goes through a gasifying process to get more vapor that can be converted into fuel.

The remaining biochar residue can then be sold as fertilizer, a component of water filters or even a wood pellet substitute, Janzen said. So the amount of biochar that can be produced can be adjusted depending on whether the company wants to sell more biochar or fuel. In general, a 10 million-gallon plant can produce about 10,000 tons of biochar. The company is working on finding buyers for its biochar.

Biochar production serves a way for Cool Planet to sequester carbon emissions. If biochar is used as fertilizer, then its carbon will stay in the soil instead of being released into the atmosphere. As a result, Cool Planet claims that its entire fuel production process in effect reduces carbon emissions by a significant amount.

The startup already has a pilot production line at its headquarters that can make 50,000 gallons of biofuel per year, and it’s building a larger plant nearby that will be able to yield 400,000 gallons per year.

]]>The future of energy in developing countries, where there is no power grid, will be distributed and local. A startup called Husk Power Systems, which has created micro power plants that burn agricultural waste in projects around India, just raised $5 million in equity to continue to expand its reach.

The company designs plants that are small — 25 KW to 100 KW in size — that can burn agricultural waste such as rice husks and produce electricity. Husk had installed about 80 such power stations in India’s northeastern state of Bihar, when we caught up with the company in the summer of 2011.

The new funding will help the company carry out some big expansion plans. Founded in 2007, Husk Power’s co-founder Manoj Sinha told us previously he wanted to build over 2,000 mini power plants by 2014. That many power plants would light up 1 million homes and replace many kerosene lamps and avoid their carbon monoxide emissions. Scaling up the operation also will be important for the company to deliver returns to its investors.

Engineering power stations that are simple to operate and repair is key to Husk Power’s strategy. Those stations are run by local residents, who aren’t likely to have the engineering backgrounds to fix complex machines. The company also installs the distribution lines for delivering the electricity to homes.

Husk Power is choosing biomass as a fuel because of its availability in farming communities. But while biomass power plants are considered “green” because of their use of farm wastes instead of fossil fuels, they are still combusting the fuel much like how a standard power plant burns coal or gas. That means biomass power stations still emit emissions that aren’t so good for the environment and human health.

Environmental trade-offs are thorny issues to grapple with and not just for rural electrification projects. Even in developed countries, such as the U.S., the building of massive solar power plants and the need by some to use lots of water for power generation and to rely on new transmission lines to bring power to cities are pitting environmental groups against developers and regulators.

Raising private money for social entrepreneurial enterprises can’t be easy — they probably don’t generate the kind of returns that are expected by venture capitalists. Husk’s investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson as well as the Shell Foundation and Acumen Fund (which was set up with seed money from the Rockefeller Foundation, Cicso Systems Foundation and three philanthropists).

But there will be no shortage of attempts to bring renewable energy to rural areas. Earlier this month, I caught a presentation by the San Francisco startup Rural Electrification with Renewable Energy (REwiRE) at the Cleantech Open’s western regional competition, and the company wants to raise money to build mini hydropower stations in rural Indonesia.

The article about the hog waste project, which was published in the Los Angeles Times, says Google invested part of the $1.2 million it cost to build the project that uses bacteria to digest hog poop, burn methane to produce electricity and convert ammonia into nitrogen for fertilizer. Duke University and the farmer Loyd Bryant were the other financiers of the system.

The article notes Google has a data center nearby, and Google will earn carbon offset credits from the system. Like some of Google’s other clean power micro investments, the project could be a way for Google to investigate ways to tap into distributed power in local regions, for either its data centers or offices. (There’s no indication this one in North Carolina will be powering anything Google related).

Remember Google was the first customer for Bloom Energy’s fuel cell, which can use biofuel, as well as natural gas and biogas, to produce electricity. Google used the Bloom Energy fuel cells to provide power in a data center test lab. Distributed energy production could be a way for Google to manage and control power costs.

As a company, Google is interested in reducing all aspects of its environmental footprint. As a firm, Google Ventures is interested in contributing to this effort both on Google’s behalf and for the benefit of positive global impact. While petroleum does not constitute a large percentage of Google’s emission profile, we are enthusiastic about supporting technologies that can help us economically reduce our carbon footprint while simultaneously contributing to our domestic energy security.

How do you think Google could use biomass and biofuel projects for its business?